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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. That it is happening is a testament to the notion that wealth is not bequeathed upon the "worthy" so much as it is the "lucky."

That said, in my experience, these kinds of moves are also made by employees who want to "impress the boss." This was one of the more interesting things I learned from the VP of sales at Sun when I was there, he said that he had to be careful to be really clear about the principles around what was considered "good selling" versus "what he wanted" because people with way fewer scruples than he had, that worked for him, would "make that happen" and be proud of the fact that the boss "didn't have to get his hands dirty."

If you ever find yourself in an organization where that sort of thing is going on (you'll recognize it if you keep an eye out for it) my advice is to leave it as soon as you can.

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> Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected.

I don't think you can have the kind of wealth Musk has without it changing who you are. I don't think his worthiness is even worth consideration, if you transferred that wealth to any of us we may handle it better or worse but it would invariably distort our decision making and worldview.

When you change someone's opportunity set to include exercising arbitrary authority over others, their decisions will become more & more domineering. When he decided he was going to take over Twitter and start cracking skulls, he was indulging his worst instincts, and we've seen him slide further into an authoritarian frame of mind.

Not to excuse Musk's actions, but he's a victim here too. I think he's had a rough few years; the pandemic was hard on all of us, and his divorce was presumably quite painful. The other day he was booed by a huge crowd; I don't care who you are, I believe such disdain by so many people has an effect on your mind. And of course his child was harassed immediately after - this seems to have been the last straw to trigger some kind of paranoid episode. It seems like he's convinced that there's a danger to himself and his family, and that he's gone into a really authoritarian headspace.

I think the lesson we should take from this is that no single person should be trusted to have this sort of power.

That's quite the generous interpretation even if the OP wasn't a posting about mastodon, a social network that directly competes with Twitter, and had nothing to do with any of the reasons you think Elon Musk is a victim in all of this.

I'm not defending him. I am a vocal Musk critic. I'll edit my comment to try to make that more clear.

ETA: After taking a stab at it, I feel like the strength of my comment is in it's empathy to Musk; I feel that turning up the volume on it's criticism would damage it's purpose of expanding the critique from Musk to the systems that enabled him. I think the sibling comment with the Caro quote does a better job than I'd do with an edit, so I've upvoted that comment and left mine as is.

If you have any suggestions though, I'm listening & willing to incorporate them.

ETA2: I've also added a quote to make it clearer why I felt this was relevant to the parent comment.

I think that’s a reasonable and charitable interpretation (which is not a bad thing imo). I haven’t been much of a Musk fan for a while now, but I still think it’s important to recognize that he’s still human and he’s definitely going through some shit.

Having to hedge basic humanity with a "while I'm not a fan" gets tiring. I think your comment is thoughtful and useful and not enabling as is.

While I agree with your last paragraph I would like to quote Robert Caro talking about power:

"But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary."

Elon is definitely a victim of capitalism and patriarchy to some degree, as are other billionaire. But they are also the main beneficiaries ans can wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills, blackjack and hookers, so my empathy has limitations.

> Elon is definitely a victim of capitalism and patriarchy to some degree, as are other billionaire.

I'm curious to know why you're bringing the concept of "patriarchy" into this discussion? Do you think Musk's gender has anything to do with his actions and behavior?

Obviously the gender role he’s playing is the most toxic parts of masculinity.

This is effectively a Elon indulging in the worst forms of toxic masculinity. Meanwhile he’s also humiliating himself. I don’t think he yet realizes that people aren’t going to forget this. Every interaction he has with someone he’s going to feel naked due to how much of his hand he’s let people read.

I'm confused here, since when does any form of masculinity include emotional flailing, gossiping, attention seeking, virtue signalling, manipulation, petty grievances, etc?

That's the toxic part

Sounds like you just describing many qualities that “super masculine” Trump showed. Those are in fact toxic behaviors of rich men.

All of these is just what we call being overcome with passion, fearlessly spreading truth, daring to step into the public arena, demonstrating personal values, cunning political manoeuvring and sticking up for yourself/revenge if we find them pathetic. The point of toxic masculinity is that the things we valorize as "traditionally male" (e.g. famously, being a rock without emotions except maybe revenge, lust and rage) are not healthy ways of dealing with bad things.

Whether he does it consciously or not, if your model of musk is a Macho whose "honor" has been impinged (by himself, but also public snipes at e.g. his private jet while posing as the man to save the climate with Tesla) and who's pettily trying to pettily re-assert his "manliness" then you've been getting a lot of ROI out of the predictions that has allowed you so far.

What I listed are actually toxic feminine behaviors. That term doesn't get used a lot because people found a hammer and think everything's a nail.

Toxic masculinity is manifested through pathological subduing of emotions, mindless stubbornness, excessive pride, inappropriate violence, misogyny, and homophobia.

If you want to apply the concept of toxic masculinity to someone it would be more appropriate for Bezos or Andrew Tate. Musk isn't behaving like that at all, and I don't like your casual misapplication of it because I can see that it's simply politically easy, misandrist, and above all, wrong.

Every social construct with show inconsistency under intense scrutiny. Humans are not consistent and masculinity has as many expressions as there are men. That's not the point.

I've loved your comments in this thread. Very well put

I’m really sick and tired of this misandry bullshit. Musk is as masculine as Elton John.

That you think Elton John isn't masculine says more about toxic masculinity than you might have intended. Why exactly is he not "masculine"?

How do you define masculinity?

The sister comment has said it, already but to add to what they said, in our society, these two are intricately linked - think of the fact that most high paying or high jobs are not compatible with participating in personally raising a family. Or the fact that (with regards to Elon) he's using the archetype of the family protector (intentionally or not) to justify going after Elonjet

I think everybody knows that you can’t solve emotional/spiritual problems with such things as “hundred dollar bills”, “blackjack”, or “hookers”. In fact those things just make matters worse. But it seems often forgotten.

This comment has nothing to do with Elon specifically.

Well said. On social media, you can often witness the sentiment "They're rich, therefore their emotional problems must be fake". Well, money solves many problems, but it also creates some new problems, and it can't fix sadness, won't help you find meaning in life, and doesn't satisfy your desire to be loved.

(This is neither an excuse nor a justification for Musk's behavior)

They can also buy therapy or relinquish their wealt if they feel empty, but the inverse (relinquishing poverty) is much harder. At a certain point (and billionaires definitely cross that), I still have empathy for them, but I think personal responsibility makes it "their problem" while the damage they can do to others is more important.

Therapy is not like an Ibuprofen that you can pop in and your headache disappears after half an hour. And "relinquishing their wealth" wouldn't automatically make them feel less sad, less empty, or less unloved. Rich people don't have these problems because of their wealth, they have them despite their wealth, because their brain is still that of a human – you know, like for the rest of us.

Yes, some empathy for those going through difficult personal times is healthy.

But when people allow their problems to harm others, we must by necessity become harder on them, try to establish protective boundaries, and hold them to account.

When someone is extremely powerful, whether through wealth, company position, or political office, the harm they can inflict increases exponentially and therefore we need to hold them to a much higher standard. They have all the resources they need to handle their personal problems through professional help and also the freedom to step back from having power and influence over others if they can't.

Having empathy for even the powerful is fine and well, as long as we don't forget to first and foremost have empathy for those they're hurting.

I agree with what you're saying. My point wasn't that we should have more empathy with bullying billionaires (although I can see how someone might read my post this way), but that even rich people sometimes have real problems that can't be easily solved by spending money.

We should have empathy with bullying billionaires, not because of anything they may or may not deserve, but because empathy is a tool for understanding humans. Empathy is a superpower.

If we fall to empathize with Musk, we can convince ourselves the problem is simply that the wrong billionaire has all that money. That's a fatal miscalculation. It is vital to understand that this power will corrupt anyone.

This is completely separate to the question of whether Musk is a good person or whether he is legally or morally responsible for his actions & the fallout from them. This is about doing right by ourselves by obtaining an accurate understanding of the world, and using that information to make good decisions about your our society should function.

I think people often conflate empathy and sympathy. I agree it's worth to try and have empathy with billionaires - otherwise, like you said, we can't build useful models of the world. The problem is that we usually can't empathise, because their reality is so detached from ours. Except when they behave extremely petty and stupid in public in very predictable ways, then it's possible to build empathy with them via these very revealing actions.

As I said to the other comment or, you can also pay for therapy. Which maybe Elon is already getting, I don't speculate about his private life.

I was responding to a comment which I agreed with except in their in my opinion overly sympathetic portrayal of a rich and powerful person who has all the capability to take personal responsibility for his mental health - making any humanising or "give him a break" rhetoric, no matter how earnest, also a part of a tradition of deflection and distraction from the debate on how to make sure no flawed human has that much power without just creating an authoritarian nanny state

I think our comments complemented each other and provided a nice rounded criticism and I appreciate that. I think you're reading me a bit uncharitably though. There has to be space to talk about how everyone would fail in that position without denouncing it as apologia.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you, personally are intending to engage in this tradition, but pointing to anyone reasoning out that in general we are very charitable to those in power while very strict to those without. While you individually might be an exception, in general I don't expect people to point out how anyone hit hard enough might fall into drug abuse/other types of socially low-ranked patterns. In germany, there is even a joke about the difference between "eccentric" and "crazy" - about 1 million euro in private wealth.

So yes, I agree there needs to be a space on how everyone in a position like Elon could or would fail - but I think it's worth keeping this explicitly not charitable but simply as an argument on why nobody should be in that position. Otherwise we, unwittingly, contribute to that apologia.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree there, I think the charitability is a feature not a bug. I think it makes the argument accessible to Musk supporters & keeps it focused on the target of the criticism. I tried to make it more vocally critical and I felt it was less effective rhetoric.

But cheers, I think the comment is better for having your comment under it.

Thanks, I think your perspective is very valid and it boils down to what we are more concerned with (and I think diversity helps here).

For me, I'm more concerned with high probability manipulators, bad faith players and power seekers (i.e. billionaires and their sycophants) exploiting the tendency to charity and pushing leeway to the limit than by failing to win over supporters (for various reasons).

But I do agree it will scare away the supporters and those who care more about the "principle of charity" (or the appearance of that principle, since it's so rarely extended to those without power when they commit desperate crimes or do stupid shit).

> if you transferred that wealth to any of us we may handle it better or worse but it would invariably distort our decision making and worldview.

Not only that, but the process of making that wealth for yourself both requires and fosters certain mindsets that are deeply unhealthy both for the individual and for society (through their influence on it).

Just as a for instance, if I were ever to end up in a position (and I know many other people who would act similarly) where I was making, say, $1 million/year, I would first make sure that things in my life were arranged just so (pay off mortgages, buy higher-quality stuff, etc)...but this would only take me so far. Even if I changed my lifestyle significantly, within no more than a few years, I would find myself without significant new things to do with that money. At that point, my attention would turn to trying to put that money to as good a use as possible: improving other people's lives.

In doing so, I would take myself out of a position to use that money as leverage to get even more money for myself. And again, I believe that many other people would do the same.

To make oneself a billionaire requires one to be so insensitive to other people's needs, or so focused on increasing one's own dollar-denominated high score that one becomes blind to them, and instead turns it all inward. Then, of course, once one starts down the road of "I need more for me," it rewards doubling down on that mindset in various ways, thus effectively training the brain to be more and more selfish.

(If I were to, through no specific effort of my own, end up with even one billion dollars, I can't even imagine what I would do with the vast majority of it. It would, indeed, distort my decision-making processes, but partly just because it's so far beyond anything I can reasonably conceive of.)

Exactly! I've been thinking along the same lines -- becoming a billionaire requires a person who will ignore the many offramps that occur along the way. Like, Elon could have retired after he sold his first company and had $20M liquid. But he rolled that over into a new company, again and again, like a pathological gambler on the world's best hot streak.

Is life better as the world's (second) richest man vs just $20M? Maybe? It seems like you have a ton of new worries about your family's security, and you become inevitably embroiled in world politics, and a target for state intelligence agencies. But you've won the status wars, and rich people who you once admired now suck up to you.

It takes a very specific personality type to choose that tradeoff.

I read a story once about a miser with a djinni, who wished for more wishes, and more and more, and eventually died on a Scrooge McDuck pile of wishes.

And after he died, the people in the town poked around his mansion, found this pile of wishes, and started using them to cure their illnesses and solve their problems.

I feel like this is a good metaphor for Musk "gathering resources for humans to become an interplanetary species" - and then blowing more money then it should take to solve world hunger on an acquisition that seems perfectly calibrated to make him more and more miserable.

Not every rich man has same publicity as mask. It's basically his own choice and he should expect this.

> Not to excuse Musk's actions, but he's a victim here too.

When you look into them, perpetrators are a victim in some way, but legal-wise we look at responsibility. Musk is responsible for his actions here.

Agreed.

I don't disagree with your statement that wealth changes people, I've watched many people, both close to me and mere acquaintances become suddenly wealthy from an equity liquidity event. And how it affected them varied wildly.

Surprisingly, a very large number (perhaps the bulk) reached a level of wealth where they didn't have to work "for" someone any more and just stopped pursuing wealth and switched over to doing other stuff.

I also find the effects on wives of rich men who in divorce became quite wealthy and how it affected their character. My unscientific sampling seems to suggest women handle it better than men. I don't know why that is, but I have noticed that many wealthy women I know don't tie their wealth to their self image. That is less common with the men I know.

I always hope that people who become wealthy have enough self awareness to recognize changes in themselves but like the lyric in the song "Life's Been Good to Me" says, "It's tough to handle this fortune and fame; Everybody's so different, I haven't changed"

Sorry but Musk was an insufferable individual long before he came into his current wealth (the most prominent examples I can think of is the manner in which he exaggerated his credentials/education).

It might be more accurate to suppose that certain types of people are more likely to come into this sort of wealth.

He was quite wealthy when he faked those credentials. Of course, Musk was always quite wealthy, so that's not saying much.

Would he be a jerk in a universe where he wasn't a successful entrepreneur? Maybe, I'm willing to accept the premise. Would he be an increasingly paranoid and conspiratorial authoritarian? Probably not.

Do certain personality types tend to become wealthy more often than others? I'd say probably. But I don't think that's at odds with what I'm saying.

If there's anything that the tech industry History taught us, is that it's a rise and fall of empires speed-run.

Everything is transitory and there's no recipe for eternal success.

> the notion that wealth is not bequeathed upon the "worthy" so much as it is the "lucky."

Rich kid with rich dad uses wealth to get richer. Pretty obvious luck is the main factor.

Why do you think he is melting down? The use of this word may be surprising, but things aren't often as binary as they appear. I bet this decision wouldn't make a polygraph needle move.

> Watching Elon melt down in real time while pissing away $44 billion dollars is not something I ever expected. That it is happening is a testament to the notion that wealth is not bequeathed upon the "worthy" so much as it is the "lucky."

If anything, another example of how a decent tech/engineer may not be the best spokesperson or decision maker.

He's not an engineer though, not even close. He isn't a tech person either. He never even got that physics degree he claims to have

I have modest to high levels of contempt for ol' muskie, but a piece of paper isn't the deciding factor for me, and I'm a formally trained physicist. Heck, Freeman Dyson never got a PhD and you'd have a hard time arguing he didn't significantly contribute to 20th century physics.

There's a difference between "my work speaks for itself; I haven't seen the need to finish my degree" and claiming a degree that you don't have.

He hasn't actually done any physics or engineering work though, that's my point. He throws money at problems, it's the spaghetti method of hiring engineers to work on problems. The only thing he contributes is capital

That's not even mentioning that half or more of his projects fail

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